Ludum Dare 22: Afterglow

So, LD22 Compo is over.
The judgement begins. My entry was Astronaut Alone
(play/rate)
which ended up being, basically, a rubbish asteroids clone. It was great fun to create though.

Next time, I’ll be more prepared… Maybe.

In the meantime, here are some lists of things.

Things that worked well this time

Tablets totally rock. Graphics tablets. I used LD as an excuse to buy myself
one. They can be found for just over a tenner (OS X drivers)
and it made creating graphics a lot faster. I can’t believe I’ve not tried one before.

Content generators are really fun to play with (cfxr, sfxr, Autotracker-Bu).
I think I may spend some spare time creating a few for different purposes.

The tight deadline forced me to handle time surprisingly well. Immediacy
is a great axe for culling long tasks.

I drew an astronaut. It didn’t look entirely shit. This makes me happy.

Whisky helps.

Things to do next time

Prototype more on paper/other non functional medium.

Don’t try to optimise anything.

If a coding problem is taking more than an hour, put a hack in.

Play with general concepts before the compo just to have things in mind.
This probably just extends to the fact I should be doing more playful/experimental
coding, with no firm gameplay in mind.

Drink more whisky.

Game to do list with some things done

Necessary:

Drifting asteroids

Wrap around

Destroy asteroid

Mine remainders

Convert graphics to entities so they can collide

Asteroid indicator

intro

win

instructions

audio in game

Graphics:

Astronaut

Asteroids

Fluff:

Smooth wrapping

Star trails

Asteroid damage

Asteroid death

Asteroid colouring

Refactoring:

Pool managers don’t need to give themselves to entities - use the names.

Pool managers can probably share a base class - or perhaps the SimpleObjectPool can do more work